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Get Smart was from an era when America could still laugh at itself,
writes Neil McMahon.

He was the swinging bachelor with the groovy pad who couldn't
walk up the stairs without falling down again; the debonair playboy
who would pick up a martini and a cigarette and then slug the drink
with the fag still in his mouth. There was a dash of Bond, a touch
of Rat-Pack Sinatra, a bit of Inspector Clouseau, but in the end he
was pure Maxwell Smart, agent 86. And now Don Adams is dead, to
which millions find themselves saying: "I asked you not to tell me
that."

Have we ever loved a television character as much as this one?
We laughed at him, and then laughed again and again, partly because
you would have to be dead not to find him funny, but also because
somewhere along the way we discovered we liked to speak like him.
We could watch Get Smart a dozen times because we found it
endlessly amusing to parrot him, right down to the nasal, staccato
delivery. The most-loved character? Probably. The most-copied?
Certainly.

Sorry about that, Chief. Would you believe ?I asked you not to tell me that. These phrases and others
entered the language 40 years ago, retaining currency down
generations. When the Herald's website asked readers to
nominate their best Max moments yesterday, scores obliged, a
reminder that in Australia from the mid-'60s this was an addiction
for millions. Many will argue for their favourite, but perhaps it
was this: Good thinking, 99.

It lives today, and good thinking it was. Teaming Adams with
Barbara Feldon - the beautiful, despairing, adoring 99 - was
television alchemy. Feldon says working with Adams was like
singing. They had perfect rhythm. "Oh, Max," 99 would sigh at his
latest act of idiocy. She was the brains of the outfit - a
beautiful, brave working girl. A role model of sorts, but it could
only go so far. She always let Max think his brilliance had saved
the day. "Let me handle this, 99," he would say, before parroting
whatever clever idea she'd just put forward. "Good thinking, Max!"
she'd reply. Eye-rolling was a Feldon specialty.

Absurdity ruled at CONTROL, the secret organisation paired
against the evil KAOS. Overseeing the mayhem was the Chief, Max's
perfect foil and father-figure, played by Edward Platt. He always
seemed on the verge of a brain explosion, and it wasn't just Max
causing it. Manning the front office was the dimwitted Larabee,
while the roster of secret agents included numbers 13 and 44,
forever stuck in mailboxes or airport lockers or washing machines;
Fang the dog; and the robot Hymie, to whom everything was literal.
"Kill the light, Hymie," Max would say. And Hymie would.

The villains are remembered as fondly. Chief among them was
Siegfried, vice-president of public relations and terrorism, whose
perennial complaint - "Shtarker, zis is KAOS, we don't (insert
activity) here" - was a foot-stamping highlight.

Every episode was a revolving door of evildoers. Many will
remember the Chinese villain, the Claw ("Not the Craw, the Craw!");
Gorcheck; Bobo; the twinkly-eyed Simon the Likeable; and a parade
of generic Eastern Europeans named Boris and Natasha.

This was, after all, the Cold War, and while Get Smart
was hardly a political comedy it was proof Hollywood could produce
something other than cloying family sitcoms - or programs whose
silliness could be endearing, but which was only an end in itself.
Gilligan's Island, whose star Bob Denver died this month,
cornered that market.

Max was more: a spoof not just of the burgeoning Bond franchise,
but a sign that Cold War America could laugh at itself.

"We have to shoot and kill and destroy," Max once said. "We
represent everything that's wholesome and good in the world." And
this, on what America should do if others did not abandon nukes:
"Then we may have to blast them. That's the only way to keep peace
in the world." Were it to be made now, it would probably be
targeted as a piece of anti-Bush smartarsery: bumbling intelligence
agencies, an invisible president who gets the Chief to sing him
lullabies so he can sleep, an enemy defined as Evil - and that was
all we needed to know about them.

But it succeeded because it was simply hysterical, and whatever
the skills of his co-stars, Get Smart was nothing without
Adams. He'd come to it in 1965, a moderately successful comedian at
42. Impressed by the pedigree of the writers - Mel Brooks and Buck
Henry - Adams leapt at it, then never escaped.

The role won him three Emmys in five years and lifelong public
affection, but this was typecasting of the first order. He could
never be seen as anything other than Max. In his other notable role
- as the voice of Inspector Gadget - he was invisible. But Adams
never shunned his alter ego, even when attempts to revive the
phenomenon on film and television failed. It would have been a
losing battle. He was too well loved.

Adams is gone at 82, from a lung infection, but he will always
bungle on - demanding the cone of silence, talking on his shoe
phone, jamming his nose in that door in the closing credits.
Forever stupid, he will be forever Smart. And, like the rest of us
loving it.

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